Why is it that we Indians search the web? Whether it is to find a job, follow the world of politics, Bollywood or cricket, stock updates or to send flowers to a friend, listen to music or just to hang out .... we come to Google with something on our mind.
As the year comes to an end, we look back at the searches in 2011 to compose the year’s Zeitgeist—the spirit of the time. With Zeitgeist, we look at the most popular and the fastest rising terms—the terms with the highest growth in 2011—in many categories across India to give you a glimpse into the hottest trends and topics. From searching for information on local politics, the Lokpal Bill and Aadhar cards, to following news on the Japan earthquake and Osama Bin Laden’s death, people turned to Google to learn more about what was happening in India and around the world.
In 2011, Bharat started coming online. It has been a coming-of-age year for the Indian internet, with young Indians following anti-corruption crusader Anna Hazare and making him the
fastest rising people query of 2011.
IBPS (Institute of Banking Personnel Selection) made a surprise appearance as one of the fastest rising searches, showing Indians’ interest in government jobs.
Indian Railways continued to be a popular search term, with Indians getting online to book tickets and searching for train timings and other railway-related information.
On a lighter note,
Poonam Pandey created a frenzy on the web with a promise she could not fulfill.
Katrina Kaif continued her reign in Bollywood as the most searched celebrity in India for the fourth year in a row. 2011 also saw the Khans ruling the web with their movies Bodyguard and Ra One in the top two positions, while movies from contemporaries Aamir Khan (Delhi Belly) and Ajay Devgan (Singham) also made a mark in the top searched movies list.
In a country where cricket is a religion, it comes as no surprise to see the Indian net buzzing with excitement with the historic World Cup win, IPL and Sachin Tendulkar’s campaign for that elusive century of centuries.
While social networking sites featured on the ‘Top Searches’ list, we also saw a sudden spurt in the use of the free SMS website way2SMS, a new entry in this year’s list.
And my personal favorite is the only tech personality to make it to the top 10.. Steve Jobs, who was one of the pillars of computing and internet age and will be missed by India’s netizens.
| Fastest rising searches | Fastest rising people | Top Searches |
Facebook
IBPS
Google+
World Cup 2011
Bodyguard
Ra.one
Anna Hazare
IPL 2011
Poonam Pandey
Ready |
Anna Hazare
Poonam Pandey
Steve Jobs
Anushka Sharma
Salman Khan
Justin Bieber
Kajal Agarwal
Katrina Kaif
Vijay Mallya
Aishwarya Rai |
Facebook
YouTube
Gmail
Yahoomail
Google
Yahoo
IRCTC
Rediffmail
Indian Railways
way2sms |
| Top Searched People | Top Searched Movies | Top Searched events/news |
Katrina Kaif
Anna Hazare
Salman Khan
Poonam Pandey
Justin Bieber
Aishwarya Rai
Sachin Tendulkar
Kareena Kapoor
Steve Jobs
Priyanka Chopra | Bodyguard
Ra One
Harry Potter
Delhi Belly
Singham
Ready
Mankatha
Transformers 3
Dookudu
Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara | IPL
World Cup 2011
CBSE result 2011
Diwali
Lokpal bill
Japan earthquake
Aadhar card
Osama Bin Laden
Pakistan
F1 |
Beginning today, you can head over to our Year-End Google Zeitgeist website (
http://www.googlezeitgeist.com/#en/) to see the top global searches of 2011, and additional top searches in more than forty countries.
We created these lists and graphs using a combination of several tools that give insight into global, regional, past and present search trends on an aggregated level.
Google Insights for Search, a publicly available tool that displays relative search volume across geographies, time periods and queries, informed many lists and graphs found on this year's Year-End Zeitgeist page.
With billions of searches conducted globally on Google each year, there are a plethora of search trends based on location, season and vertical, and our Year-End Zeitgeist cannot possibly capture them all. If you want to come up with your own lists or graphs, we encourage you to play around with our public
Google Insights for Search tool to generate your own "Zeitgeist" lists for 2011.
Thanks to everyone out there for searching on Google -- and here's to more searching in 2012!
Posted by Lalitesh Katragadda, Country Head - India Products
